Encouraging shared responsibility without invoking collective guilt: exploring pedagogical responses to portrayals of suffering and injustice in the classroom

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how pedagogically productive the idea of invoking feelings of collective guilt in classrooms might be. It attempts to explore not only the persistence of ‘collective guilt’ in students’ responses, but also new possibilities that are opened when ‘collective guilt’ is reframed as ‘shared responsibility’. The analysis addresses the moral, political and pedagogical implications of viewing the phenomena of collective guilt and shared responsibility through the lenses of Hannah Arendt and Iris Marion Young. The paper suggests that, using Arendt’s and Young’s accounts of shared responsibility offers educators and students opportunities to become aware of their responsibilities as members of particular social groups, rather than getting stuck in guilt. The proposed pedagogy of shared responsibility is not focused on blame, guilt or fault, but rather it has the potential to minimize denials of complicity and instead encourage students to interrogate the conditions under which they are responsive and responsible to others.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective guilt
• shared responsibility
• Hannah Arendt
• Iris Marion Young
• suffering
• injustice
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting these questions.